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writtenbyhappynerds · 4 years

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FF102: Unit 4, Writing Children

Hello! So, because we screwed the pooch and didn’t take into consideration how long it would take to write the Diversity chapter, we are giving you 2 chapters in 1 week. The second part of this week is writing kids, which came about after the many parent fics and Hogwarts/Percy Jackson fics that the Editor and I have read.

The biggest mistake you can do, the one that really shows your lack of experience as a writer is dumbing down children. Kids are just like any other adult OC. They need growth, motivation, strengths, and weaknesses. You lose power in writing kids when you infantilize them, and you need to understand the general age brackets of how kids operate. I myself struggle with this, but kids can hold a conversation just like an adult can. They can have meaningful and profound discussions. That’s how the saying, ‘out of the mouth of babes’ came around. Now, that doesn’t mean that the children are smarter than adults, but they can absolutely keep up. For example, I had a talk with my 7-year old cousin once. She asked me if I thought of myself as funny. I said yes, and she then asked if I had to work hard to be funny or if God made me naturally funny. It was a conversation I wasn’t prepared for, but I still had it with her all the same. Think back to when you were a kid. If you didn’t talk like or do the things you’re making your child OC do, then don’t make that OC do them!

What we usually see in child OCs is that they are cut back emotionally and mentally to the age of a common 3-year old. Pervocracy wrote a great memo on how to handle children while they worked as a childless nurse. I will summarize that memo and add my own notes as well. It will be cited below for your convenience.

From the time of birth to a year old, the child is a baby. They can crawl and walk, and may have a few words or be able to recognize people, may know parts of the body “Can you show me where your feet are?” but they are essentially small animals. You have to be gentle and affectionate, and don’t expect them to cooperate. Babies cry, but more often than not they cry as a means to communicate.

A child aged 1-2 years old is a bit more difficult. They have more mobility and have gained more of a voice. The “terrible twos” come in to play here and the child is able to walk and run around. Often children at this age are dependent on the response of their caregivers. If a child falls, they only will make a big deal out of said fall because their caregiver does. They cry because their caregiver has clued them in socially that they are hurt. That’s why you see a lot of moms tell their babies, “it’s okay!” or “you’re okay.” They have to reassure the child that they are in fact fine so the child does not react. Children at this age can speak, but it may still be simple sentences. They can’t get deep yet. They also will recognize strangers and want to avoid them.

A toddler/preschool child is around the age of 3-5 years old. They are more socialized, given this is the age where most children go to daycare, preschool, or kindergarten. They are potty trained by this age. Do not write a 3-5-year-old OC and have her still in diapers. That isn’t realistic. These kids are also fully mobile, and this is the age where you can start seeing the baby’s personality. Are they a hyper child? Do they like animals? If the child dances, most dancers start pre-ballet classes at this age. Do they want to go outside all the time or are they more comfortable spending time inside? Babytalk from the child, ie: mama, dada, I want, etc. Is not realistic. Again, the child may have simple sentences, but they’ve learned enough words at this point to not have to resort to speaking like that. These kids are easily distracted and likely have been weaned off naps. Parents can still babytalk these kids, a phrase here which means speak to them in that sweet little-kid voice, but the baby will not babytalk to their parents.

A small child is roughly the ages of 6-10. These kids in America are already in school. A 6-year old is the average age of first graders, and a 9/10-year-old is roughly a 3rd grader. They will not respond well to babytalk. These kids want to be treated like adults but may still have childlike tendencies (may still pout, whine, cry, etc.). They have been fully socialized by this point as they will have had years in daycare or school racked up at this point. They are outgoing and less afraid of strangers. Most prodigy children who play an instrument will have started their instrument around age 5 or 6 (source: was a prodigy child. Started violin at 6). They like to see cool or fun or gross facts and are eager to learn and joke around. At this age you’re still watching Spongebob unironically, so treat them as such.

A preteen is around the ages of 11-14. The child, if it’s a girl, may experience her first period, the child, if it’s a boy, will go through puberty. Girls may develop quicker, as many boys can recall a point in like 5th grade where all the girls were suddenly taller than them. These children are fussy and frustrated because they think they know more than they actually do, but are still treated for the most part like kids. They still need bedtimes and house rules and restrictions, but they don’t want them. A child will likely learn swearwords and start using them out of sight of their parents around the age of 12. This is also where a child’s cringe phase comes in because they will be going through middle school, which is the worst time in every kid’s life and a time that they all want to forget.

A teenager is around 15-18. These are young adults. They have freedoms, mainly the ability to drive a car, but their life experience is limited. Around this age is where a child would get a girlfriend or boyfriend. No sex at this age. Don’t do that to your OCs. In Harry Potter, we often see writers jumping the gun and having their OCs hook up with Draco Malfoy in the third year. That’s too early for a kid. That kid would still be a preteen, and their life experience is limited. They also would be incapable of giving consent for something like that. Wait until they are 15-18. In Harry Potter fanfic, that would be years 5-7. This age of OC will want some autonomy away from their parents. If they visit the doctor’s office they may want to go alone. If you offered them a sticker at the doctor’s office, they’d take it ironically. They may experience early stages of depression, anxiety, or stress that can be caused by their school or home life because they have more expectations placed on them. They may have hobbies or be involved in after-school activities. A 17-year-old or 18 year old will be thinking about college.

Notice the progression as the ages go up. A 5 or 6-year-old won’t have the pressures of a 17-year old, but they can still hold a conversation and do similar activities to the teenager. A 1-year old will speak in baby talk, but that window is very small and narrow, and in fanfiction we often see it carry on for much longer than it should. Babies grow faster than you think. They develop faster too, and you don’t want to limit your OC’s ability for growth because you’ve shoehorned them into one specific age. Child OCs deserve character growth just like adult OCs. The fun part about writing kid OCs is that the audience can see them grow into what would be already-developed personality traits and hobbies in an adult OC. The things that would get added to your internal character bio get to grow and blossom right in front of us. If you write a child OC, give them the chance to do that. Give them the chance to grow.

Finally, most Harry Potter or Percy Jackson fanfics start the OC off as a first-year, which luckily for us is the same age as a new camper at Camp Half-Blood. Both are 11 or 12. We had a note for young OCs in Fanfiction 101 Unit 3: Please Stop Using Emily Rudd. I will reiterate that point: these OCs are 11-12 at the start of the fanfic. You should not be describing how “strikingly beautiful” an 11 or 12-year-old is. On top of that, children don’t notice things like that. Save attraction for when they’re like 14. That’s when it’ll have a more meaningful impact.

Next week we’ll be getting more technical. The next unit is a topic the Editor and I have a lot of experience in, and hopefully, we’ll be able to bring in some outside perspectives.

Xoxo, Gossip Girl.

Sources:

Pervocracy's Tumblr

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cmtrydrve · 5 years

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hey ! my name’s link , i go by he/they pronouns , am 21+ & live in the cst timezone ! my only personality trait is being a bts , sment & girl groups enthusiast . i’m an aries sun with a pisces moon , which means i can be aggro , am always loud & obnoxious , but am a secretly sensitive softy , so plz be nice to me !!! this is my child , mikey , who’s stuck in 2006 & never grew out of his emo phase ( take that , mom ! ) . he’s also an aries , because my jjks always end up like that . hopefully , you’ll love him as much as i already do ! under the cut , you’ll find some misc . info & wanted connections . here are links to his dossier page & his pinterest board , which will hopefully give you some deeper insight . i’m excited to be here & write with you all ! like this if you’d like to plot & i’ll fly to your ims , but also feel free to add me on d*scord ( it’s easier for me as well ) : no brain only loving bts#6669 !

— jeon jungkook. he/they. demiboy. | was that michael “mikey” kwon i just saw in the hideaway lobby ? i hear the twenty-two year old spends most of their time working as a record store clerk / studying communications , but i’ve always just seen them dyeing their hair different colors with kool-aid . they live in 3c and i often see them in the halls. they always give me a vibe of getting into arguments online , an entirely black wardrobe and drinking six cups of coffee to make it through the day .

misc . info :

his parents are both very hip artists who met & fell in love while attending art school. they’re both very modern kind of parents, which meant that mikey grew up around a lot of self-expression (& being told to try it for himself), paint everywhere & pot.

growing up, he was allowed to paint his walls & even ceiling however he pleased & it instilled a love of creativity in him. his parents still have paintings he did as a child hanging up on their walls & fridge. even now, he still draws casually, though it was always a hobby for him & not his actual passion.

his parents are extremely caring & understanding. as a teenager, they allowed him to go out & party & always made sure to get him home safely. mikey genuinely can not remember a single time they ever yelled at him even when he fucked up massively. so he tries his best to make sure they’re happy & taken care of. but they’re adamant in supporting whatever mikey wants to do.

they were both the alternative types, which meant that rock music filled their home. mikey was familiar with classic rock from a young age & the sounds of fleetwood mac & other similar bands fills him with a warmth that can only be attained from childhood nostalgia.

his first taste of love came at the age of seven. his parents always brought home new albums to listen to & his dad purchased three cheers for sweet revenge by my chemical romance. while the screaming & raging instruments could have been too much for anyone else his age, mikey embraced it fully.

it ignited an adoration for the genre as a whole & soon enough, his parents were bringing home various emo music albums to sate the always dramatic & over-reacting mikey. for christmas, he received mcr’s discography (at the time, just two albums) on vinyl, which he still has hanged proudly on his wall as an adult.

he owns every variation of every mcr album now. vinyl, cd, cassettes. he even collects the japanese versions because he likes the way they’re designed.

he dropped the name mike / michael because of mikey way & he refuses to answer to anything else.

even though it’s largely part of “cringe culture” now (which mikey refuses to participate in), he loves hot topic & goes there whenever he can. his closet is full of band tees & he has a drawer filled with those spiky belts, bracelets & pants with the suspenders from his teenage years.

he’s been dyeing his hair regularly since he was twelve. he’s had every color under the sun. this is what his hair currently looks like but he dyes the highlights with kool-aid, so the color is always changing.

he has a nostril piercing & would probably get more done if someone so much as implied that he should.

he has a mcr stan twitter account & he gets into fights with everyone he decides has a wrong opinion. he’s been suspended multiple times for being too aggressive online, but he always comes back. he also has a tumblr account but he just uses it to reblog pictures of gerard way (his bias KJHFDKJ).

he works at a record store & goes to school for communications. he hopes to either be a radio dj or podcast host. he wants to get paid to talk about how much he loves music either way. but he loves his current job because he gets to talk about music all day and recommend albums to people. also it’s helpful in perfecting his own vinyl collection.

yes, he cried the day mcr broke up & yes he bought tickets to all their reunion shows. he took the day off when the tickets went on sale & his boss was understanding, knowing how much he loves the band.

he’s extremely impulsive. if you tell him to do anything, he more than likely will. he has a lot of stupid scribbled tattoos on him for this reason, especially on his hands.

while he doesn’t mind appearing masculine & even embraces it, he doesn’t fully align with being a man. he started identifying as nonbinary in his teens, but has never felt 100% a man his whole life. he’s fine with both he or they pronouns for the most part, though he does have his preferences day to day. he introduces himself as nonbinary so it’s not a secret & everyone who interacts with him is aware.

he’s kind of a party animal. he’s that loud person who drinks too much & ends up blacked out on the floor.

he gets in trouble a lot, because he plays music very loudly at both his workplace & his apartment. but he’s of the opinion that if music is too loud for you then you’re just too old.

he’s aggressive & very arrogant. he will fight you about anything & everything. he just likes to argue & he thinks he’s right about everything.

in typical aries fashion, he loves to flirt & be flirted with. he just adores attention & seeks out affection where he can find it. he gets crushes really easily & pursues aggressively (he’s extremely charming & good at making people feel good about themselves), but he gets bored when he actually obtains the person he desires. he’s never really seriously dated, but has had over a billion crushes in his lifetime.

thought dramatic & annoying most of the time, he’s also very loyal & has a good heart. if you’re in his circle of people he likes, then he’ll do anything for you point blank. he always tells his friends that he’d die for him & he means it.

while he tries to appear confident, he has secret insecurities stemming from being the middle child. he has issues with feeling like he’s not good enough or thinks he’s unnoticed by everyone, so he acts up by being dramatic.

he drinks A LOT of coffee, so he’s pretty much always bouncing off the walls.

he’s extremely pansexual & loud about it. if you’ve known him for longer than five minutes then you’ll find out how he wishes he could smash gerard way specifically in the helena mv to smithereens.

he very casually knows how to play guitar. he’s that person who plays wonderwall at every party.

while he’s not a fan of pop music, he knows most girl group dances & can do them well.

wanted connections :

exes (any gender. it will more than likely be something casual, like a few months or less, but we can discuss the timeline! also it can be messy or friendly. extra points if there’s lingering feelings!)

hookups / fwbs (any gender. singular experiences or regular type things)

childhood plots for those who’ve lived in seattle (childhood friends, first kisses / crushes, all that good stuff)

flirtationships that don’t go anywhere

one-sided crushes (don’t mind who has the feelings!)

mutual pining but they’re both idiots & have no idea

party buddies (can be drinking &/or smoking). emo music buddies. netflix buddies. any of these can be combined.

enemies???? (if we can decide on a suitable plot. or enemies with benefits :smirk:)

someone who knows of mikey from his stan twitter but doesn’t realize it’s him & talks shit openly about the asshole who runs the account in front of him.

on the opposite side of the spectrum, someone who he flirts with in the dms & they plan to meet up after realizing they live in the same apartment building.

tinder date (it can go well or not)

frequent customers (customers he flirts with or can’t stand because they just loiter or gets into fights with because they have bad taste in music

someone who takes advantage of mikey being willing to do anything he’s dared to do. make him do all the stupid shit he shouldn’t be doing, whether it’s getting tattoos / piercings or anything dangerous or just idiotic.

you’re sick of this asshole blasting music late at night & go to yell at him for it but oops he’s actually attractive (or you actually can’t stand him, whichever GKDHFGJFKD).

i have a huge tag full of plots i’d love to do on my rp spam blog. not all of them will be fitting for mikey but just ask me & we can try to change some elements or something!

literally anything you can think of i’m probably down for it!

#hide:intro #◟ * 𝟎𝟏𝟑. 𝑔𝑜 ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑝𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑝𝑙𝑧 › OUT OF CHARACTER #not me being ready on time for once wow

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aion-rsa · 5 years

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Den of Geek's Best Books of 2019

https://ift.tt/2F47xc4

Here were the 20 books that meant the most to our Den of Geek contributors in 2019.

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To cover and consume popular culture in this era of #PeakContent is to constantly be making choices. This means it is more important now than ever to reflect on the ways in which "best of" lists, just like pop culture itself, are subjective—shaped by a group of people with specific identities, interests, and storytelling sensibilities.

Therefore, in presenting our list of the Best Books of 2019 to you, we note that these stories are not just what may have felt Important in a year when we are more desperate than ever to understand the seemingly increasingly destructive forces at work in the world, but also what meant the most to us personally.

Here are 20 books, in no particular order, that broke through the #PeakContent cacophony to mean something to our Den of Geek contributors this year...

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

A time travel novel that soundly rejects the Great Man Theory of history, The Future of Another Timeline is uninterested in telling the same old story about a singular white dude traveling through time to heroically and simply save the day. In Annalee Newitz's second novel, making positive change in the timeline is mostly conducted by women and people of color, must be done collectively, and is a heck of a lot of work.

Told in alternating perspectives, The Future of Another Timeline follows middle-aged, time-traveling academic Tess and 17-year-old Beth, a high school student exploring the punk scene in 1992 California. Both characters are deeply informed by their interpersonal contexts. For Tess, that means the support of the Daughters of Harriet, a group of women and non-binary folks fighting to stop a group of time-traveling misogynists known as the Comstockers from securing a timeline in which women have no rights over their own bodies. For Beth, this means her high school friend-group, which represents an escape from her abusive home until they start seeking violent "solutions" to the abusive men in their communities.

read more: Autuonomous by Annalee Newitz — Robots, Love, and Identity Under Capitalism

Wonderfully nerdy and refreshingly radical, The Future of Another Timeline is the angry feminist time travel novel 2019 both needs and deserves, a speculative fiction experience that feels all too real in its depiction of how fragile women's rights can be while also representing the kind of collective action organizing that stands the best chance at saving us all.

"We deeply need hope right now because we're in a very precarious, self-destructive historical moment," Newitz told Den of Geek this year regarding the hopepunk movement. "I think of hopepunk as narrative therapy for historical trauma—it's a way to ease pain, to tell stories about the healing process as well as what has hurt us." The Future of Another Timeline is a story about what has hurt us and what can heal us.

- Kayti Burt

Read The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

An assassin and a dragon-rider need to save the world from a dragon horde in this doorstopper. The Priory of the Orange Tree’s scenes more remarkably quick compared to the intimidating length of the book, with the author demonstrating a keen understanding of cliffhangers, dramatic timing, and creating characters who care about each other and their world.

Ead Duryan has been assigned to protect Queen Sabran of Inys, but also has to wrestle with the way Inys twisted a true story into an oppressive religion while hiding her true mission and her attraction to the queen. On the other side of the world, the dragon-rider Tané finds that her path to becoming a great warrior isn’t as straightforward as she had hoped, and that her choices will have global ramifications. Side characters, especially the grieving and miserable alchemist Niclays Roos, stuck with me long after I finished reading the book.

High fantasy is a hard sell for me lately. Monarchy, destined heroes, elves and dwarves—It doesn’t feel comfortable, it just feels old. I picked up Priory on the promise of dragons, though, hoping for something new to be done with the quintessential fantasy creature. Samantha Shannon delivered with fantasy that both embraces and improves on tropes. The world is a loosely changed version of our own, with fantasy cultures drawn from and paralleling real ones. It offers beautiful imagery and lush characterization. Explanations for how the magic of the world works and how it’s connected to that world’s history are smoothly threaded into the plot. The book also doesn’t lose sight of wonder, with enough cinematic fight scenes and detailed description of clothing for any HBO adaptation.

- Megan Crouse

Read The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez

If you don't regularly read middle grade fiction, you may recognize Carlos Hernandez's name from his beautiful and well-received short story collection The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, which came out a few years ago (or from his entertaining Twitter account). If you do read middle grade fiction, especially if you've been following the really excellent middle grade fantasy from the Read Riordan imprint, you've probably already met two of my very favorite characters of 2019... Sal and Gabi were breakaway leads in my fiction reading, and they're welcome to break my universe any time (especially since they're promising to fix it in May 2020).

Here's the conceit: middle school magician Sal has this uncanny ability to accidentally breach the multiverse. Sometimes this means he can do some pretty nifty tricks (which he passes off as illusions), like putting a dead chicken in a bully's locker. But it becomes a big problem when he keeps accidentally bringing back his Mami, who died several years ago. His father has remarried, and Sal loves his American Stepmom, but he misses his mother.

Sal is also a Type 1 diabetic, and when his ability to breach the multiverse makes him forget to regulate his blood sugar, he ends up in the hospital—something he's unfortunately used to. Initially, Gabi doesn't know about any of this, but she's the student council president, future journalist type who's not about to let any mystery lie without figuring it out. Because her baby brother is also in the hospital, fighting for his life, her story and Sal's become intertwined, and while multiverse hopping hijinks ensue, so does a story with so much heart that it's hard to put down.

I can't wait to spend more time with these characters as their adventures continue.

- Alana Joli-Abbott

Read Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

At first glance, Leckie’s newest book could not be more different than her Ancillary Justice series, not least of all because she’s smoothly stepped from science fiction to fantasy. The Raven Tower is a standalone fantasy novel, and a slim one at that; instead of a whole universe, its action encompasses two cities across a strait, and one family within them. But it’s how the story is told that cements this as Leckie’s brand of unique invention: A sentient rock god narrates in second-person to a trans protagonist.

Like with Breq, the spaceship AI constrained to one body, Leckie has once again pulled off a cunning experiment in giving voices to the most unusual of genre characters. The passages in which the stone god details its centuries of existence, and evolving relationships with human petitioners and priests, are some of this year’s most daring fantasy writing: slow and unhurried, filled with complex discussions of the power of language to change the very molecules of the world. Despite its brevity, The Raven Tower is wonderfully dense and thought-provoking.

What’s more, the human side of things is so authentically lived-in, a fantasy retelling of Hamlet that nonetheless is full of twists. In the city of Vastai, the Raven’s Lease, a human whose lifespan is entwined with that of the Raven god’s Instrument (an actual bird), has disappeared without paying up. As soldier-turned-heir’s-attendant Eolo investigates the truth, he and his master Mawat confront divine debt, issues of personhood, and the troubling disillusionment that the old ways and religions might be no more than cold comforts in an inexplicable world.

- Natalie Zutter

Read The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From the jump, it's easy to understand why Sally Rooney's second novel, Normal People, has taken the literary world (and much of Book Twitter) by storm. It's a story of two teenagers, Connell and Marianne, growing up in vastly different circumstances West of Ireland. The book follows their magnetic pull on (or perhaps dire fascination with) one another as they grow up and make their way in the world.

At only 28, Rooney writes through her two protagonists to get at incisive commentary on that strange, fleeting feeling of obsessive youthful love, as well as class, family, what it means to "get out," and the many small ways people are awful to one another, while also loving one another rather tenderly. Considering how often love stories and the (young) women who tell them are diminished, it's also lovely to see Rooney discussed (mostly) with terms like "intellectual rigor."

Hulu is adapting Normal People as a limited series in 2020, so there's still time to read the book before the show starts. Reviewers talk of page turners, but Normal People is one that forces readers to cancel their plans and stay up until first light, ruining their ability to function for the next day, just to squeeze in a few more chapters, a few more lines of Rooney's entrancing prose. Much like the plot summary, the text might seem simple or even commonplace at first glance, but that is Rooney's great deception: she's working overtime to make sure you don't ever see her sweat. Normal People envelopes readers quietly, completely, and so steadily that you might not realize anything has happened until you come up for air hours later, or see the drip of a tear on the page.

- Delia Harrington

Read Normal People by Sally Rooney

The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen

Elaborate YA fantasies are all the rage right now, and 2019 had several great ones. But Margaret Owen’s debut novel The Merciful Crow is far and away the best of the lot, combining immersive storytelling, a diverse cast of characters, rich worldbuilding and a truly unique magical system into something that will stay with you long after you turn the last page. In short: Everyone in Sabor is divided into castes named after various birds and based on their particular Birthrights, or magical ability. The Crows, the lowest caste of undertakers and mercy-killers, perform magic using the teeth of the dead. It’s…very grim and very cool.

The story is fast-paced and exciting, and for all that it deals with typical fantasy themes (a girl coming into her power, a kingdom on the brink of revolution), The Merciful Crow fearlessly tackles issues of racism, persecution and the difficulties that face any marginalized group that’s mocked and looked down upon for being Other. Even better we see characters openly grapple with their own beliefs and question the things they’ve been taught to believe about others in a way that feels both compelling and natural. The book’s sequel, The Faithless Hawk, is due out this summer, and if it’s not already at the top of your most anticipated books for next year, it should be.

- Lacy Baugher

Read The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion was one of my favorite books in 2017, so when I heard her next endeavor was a space marine time travel story, I could hardly wait. The Light Brigade delivered. It’s an exploration of the military industrial complex, the psychology of a soldier named Dietz, and a meticulously organized time travel story. The action scenes are vivid and grim, the dialogue energetic, the stakes clear. Hurley has a lot to say about the nature of war, of trauma, of the psychology of being thrown into unexpected battles every day. (The “light” of the title is a teleportation system that Dietz is experiencing as time jumps.)

This is a writer’s book, with an impressive structure: scenes end at what could have been abrupt moments but instead become a tool to increase suspense throughout the novel. The author has posted images of the chart she used to keep the time jumps in order, and you can tell the process of outlining the book was a feat of not just writing but also a kind of engineering, resulting in a convoluted but utterly understandable sequence of out-of-order events. It’s hard science fiction rooted in classics but utterly suitable for today.

- Megan Crouse

Read The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

In a future generations after humanity has fled an uninhabitable Earth, humans live on January, a tidally-locked planet with two declining cities living in the twilight in-between the two extreme climates of the world...

Bordering the blistering side of the planet, we have Xiosphant, an authoritarian city with a constructed diurnal cycle where "timefulness" is sacred. Bordering the frozen side of the planet, we have Argelo, a libertarian society ruled by nine family-affiliated gangs who keep the city locked in a cycle of violence. As the generation ship technology brought with humanity decades before begins to fail, decline feels inevitable for both examples of human society.

We follow two main characters through the story: Sophie, a working class student studying at Xiosphant's university who is exiled into the night after taking the fall for the upper-class object of her affections Bianca. Rather than dying a lonely death, Sophie is saved by the crocodile-like telepathic aliens native to January. Elsewhere, we follow Mouth, a jaded smuggler from an otherwise extinct nomadic people known as the Citizens.

An exploration of working towards radical change in the face of climate catastrophe, personal and collective trauma, and interpersonal complications, The City in the Middle of the Night is a classically science fiction novel tapping into the most anxiety-inducing of contemporary struggles, and somehow finding a measure of hope there. "I can't do this thing anymore, where we live in a tiny space and pretend it's the whole world," Sophie tells Bianca in the novel. "People always have brand new reasons for doing the same thing over and over. I need to see something new."

- Kayti Burt

Read The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

If you know the names Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly it is likely only due to the reason for their deaths. These five women are the canonical victims of the infamous Jack the Ripper, and are generally only considered remarkable because of the fact that they died violently at the hands of a serial killer no one ever managed to catch.

Author Hallie Rubenhold’s book changes all of that. In the world of Ripper lore, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper feels revelatory, in that it focuses on life, rather than death. It tells the real story of each of The Five, who they were, where they came from, and the tragic reasons that led them to a life on the streets of Victorian London. And it gives them their voices back, possibly for the first time since their deaths.

Meticulously researched, this book brings to life a group of women who have too long been silenced, or worse, reimagined in a way that suits history best. The majority of these women weren’t prostitutes, as the contemporary papers positioned them and history likes to remember them. They were women who struggled and scraped, who suffered repeated hardships and abandonments, who struggled with poverty and alcohol addiction, and who deserved better than deaths that left them forever in the shadow of a monster. Read this, and remember them.

- Lacy Baugher

Read The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

The Grace Year by Kelly Liggett

In a year where Margaret Atwood herself wrote a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s probably not that much of a shock that some of 2019’s most affecting stories have to do with female rage and empowerment. The Grace Year is a technically a YA novel, but it packs an outsize punch, reckoning with a dystopian future that nowadays feels far too much like it could in some way become reality.

read more: Feminist Science Fiction Novels to Read after The Handmaid's Tale

In the world of Garner County, young women are banished on their sixteenth birthday, condemned to spend their “grace year” on an isolated island to purge themselves of the dangerous and manipulative magic men believe they possess. The bones of Kim Liggett’s story are familiar ones, particularly the harmful culture these girls are born into and the cruel things they’re willing to do to one another in the name of maintaining it, but its story is ultimately one that points a way toward a future where change is possible. It’s not often you finish a story like this and genuinely feel hopeful, and yet, The Grace Year accomplishes this feat – all without giving anyone what you might call a happy ending.

- Lacy Baugher

Read The Grace Year by Kelly Liggett

Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles

The Beatles' film Let It Be appears to be a documentary on the breakup of a band. The album they recorded after it, Abbey Road, has always been touted as the album they made to go out on a high note. Kenneth Womack's Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and The End of the Beatles, says that's not the case. They were recording what they thought was just their next album when they happened to break up. The band was especially excited about playing with new musical toys.

As should be evident by the name, the book starts with the sound board. The only eight track recording console at EMI. It was bright and shiny and new, and only a privileged few engineers were allowed to tinker with it, and they had to wear lab coats. The band was far away from the caper-chasing characters they played in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! but they were still fab enough to abscond with the apparatus and produce their flawless farewell to studio albums.

Almost the entire book is set in the studio. We learn about a car crash John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and their respective children survive from how it impacts the sessions. Paul McCartney's marriage happens barely out of reach of the soundproof panels and the Bed-In for Peace is placed far away from the mics. Even the breakup itself is captured as the same kind of ambient noise McCartney recorded on George Harrison's Moog synthesizer for the segues between songs. Like the surround sound created for Ringo Starr's only credited drum solo, the music is front and center.

Womack is a thorough researcher and interviewer who casts new light on old Beatles mythology. Several stories which are well-known to fans are challenged and a few more obscure bits are uncovered. The read itself is fun.

- Tony Sokol

Read Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles

Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff

Modern Irish literary greatness is alive and well, and anyone who reads Last Ones Left Alive can see why. Sarah Davis-Goff's spare post-apocalyptic tale follows Orpen on a largely solitary journey from her home on a remote island, away from the vicious, otherworldly creatures called the Skrake. The novel flashes back to Orpen's childhood alone on the island, with her Ma and Ma's wife, Maeve, as Orpen trained to survive against the unseen enemy while trying to decode what happened to the world, and fending off her own loneliness. In Orpen's present tense, she makes the difficult decision to search the mainland for help, accompanied by her dog, some chickens, and pulling a wheel barrow.

To say more would spoil it, and certainly part of the book's power is in the way it slowly reveals the truths of the Skrake, Orpen's upbringing, and what led her to go on the road. Beyond that, it's a story of self-reliance with feminism baked in, rather than discussed or layered on top. Orpen's instincts keep her safe and she is largely a solitary creature, so the novel has a desolate, almost animalistic quality to it that captures the Wild Atlantic Way and the feral nature of civilization gone to hell. Davis-Goff evokes the setting - both physical and emotional - so intensely that it feels like Orpen walks around with you even when you put the book down. It's a book that knows exactly what it set out to do, creates that world, and then cuts the reader off from it once the task at hand is finished, with the kind of efficiency Maeve taught Orpen to keep her alive.

- Delia Harrington

Read Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff

Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

Set in an alternate universe where the United States elected a female divorcee Democrat from Texas to the presidency in 2016, Red, White, and Royal Blue follows the secret, enemies-to-lovers romance between first son Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince of England Henry. In the process, author Casey McQuiston invites us to spend time in a world that is, as described in her author's note, "still believably fucked up, just a little better, a little more optimistic."

The result is an intensely cathartic reading experience that prioritizes comfort over grit, hope over pessimism, and empathy over bitterness, while also depicting tough subjects such as mental illness and civic exhaustation. In a year when to stay actively engaged in the news cycle often felt like a neverending battle, Red, White, and Royal Blue offered a brand of escapism that is all too rare in the mainstream: queer, filled with male characters who do their own emotional labor, and unapologetically millennial. The world needs more stories like this one, as well as the cultural space for more people to find guiltless pleasure in their enjoyment.

- Kayti Burt

Read Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis

Confession #1: I picked up this book on NetGalley because it has a gorgeous cover. Confession #2: My NetGalley copy expired when I was 80 pages from the end. Confession #3: I went out and purchased the book the same day my NetGalley copy expired, because I had to finish it.

The Good Luck Girls is Davis' debut novel, and it packs an incredible punch. Set in an alternate world—possibly a future dystopia on a different planet, but there are fantasy elements that make it hard to place entirely—where people with shadows have more rights than those who don't, the book centers on five young women fleeing life in a brothel.

Dustblood, or shadowless, girls are frequently sold by poor families into "welcome houses," given the promise of a better life: regular meals, fancy clothes, luxury. The condition, of course, is that they have no rights over their own bodies, and they are never allowed to leave, branded with a magical tattoo that reveals their identities, and glows and burns if they try to cover it.

When Clementine accidentally kills a violent brag, she, her sister, and their friends make a daring escape, turning to a life of banditry in an effort to reach the legendary Lady Ghost, who can offer them a different future—if she's real. The result is a twisted Weird Western that feels like the Wild West, while twisting its tropes and delivering a story about victims taking back their own destinies and carving a new path toward a better future.

- Alana Joli-Abbott

Read The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

There are two phrases from this year that my friends and I shout at one another whenever we’re in the same room. One flesh, one end (from Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth) is a fun little rallying cry, but it is this piece of poetry from Martine’s debut novel that makes me tear up every time I utter it: "Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun."

While I have always enjoyed space opera well enough, considering how many stories fit within the subgenre, this is the first book where I found myself delighting in all of the trappings. Martine dives deep into this byzantine far-future universe, clearly so excited about every detail that you cannot help but be equally enthusiastic… even when you rationally know that you should not be so captivated by colonialism.

But that’s the point. Teixcalaanli civilization, with its alien-yet-logical naming conventions and obsession with its own epic poetry, is so addictively interesting that readers are automatically as emotionally invested as diplomat Mahit Dzmare. After an upbringing on the empire’s fringes in independent Lsel Station, Mahit finally gets to visit Teixcalaan’s famed city-planet capital, only to be thrust into a political thriller full of mysterious deaths, sex-as-diplomacy, and an emperor with an unusual agenda. Not to mention, Mahit has her own cultural capital that she must keep from getting assimilated into the empire like everything else in the universe.

Read A Memory Called Empire knowing as little as possible, aside from the fact that you will meet a bevy of damn competent women and find yourself murmuring about spears released in no time. The fact that Teixcalaan is a culture obsessed with repeating the patterns of its epic stories in contemporary life is so endearingly geeky and very relatable to our present moment.

- Natalie Zutter

Read A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

You Look Like A Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works

Janelle Shane became internet-famous through her blog AI Weirdness and its social media offshoots. Her wacky computer-generated lists have been making me laugh for years, so I was quick to jump on her first paper book of artificial intelligence and humor. Half of the appeal are the lists of computer-generated things: the title comes from a list of comically nonsensical and occasionally sweet pickup lines. There are plenty of lists like these in the book, providing a break in the science for some high-quality random humor. The networks she trains don’t know what words they should be putting together, so they surprise in a way that a human could never quite do.

The other half of the appeal is the science. Shane outlines what in our daily lives counts as artificial intelligence and what doesn’t, why asking “what the program was thinking” is a nonsensical question, and how artificial intelligence (specifically, certain kinds of machine learning) actually works. Ideas are explained with precision, clarity, and ease. The science is also funny without being twee. This was both one of the most informative and most fun books I read all year. To be one would be nice; to be both is astonishing.

- Megan Crouse

Read You Look Like A Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

I had never read any of Winterson’s work, but her modern, queer retelling—not just of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but of the entire process around writing the first science fiction novel—makes clear just how lacking all other Frankenstein adaptations are in innovation and relatability. Most concern the doctor and his creature locked in a cat-and-mouse game of wits and horror, yet still so predictable that they all blur together whether period piece or futuristic cyborg story or police procedural. Yet Winterson’s take is so radically different from its forebears that you find yourself not guessing how the story will turn out, despite the fact that she lays out the narrative beats in the beginning and follows them—with the occasional detour to a sex robot convention or London’s waterlogged underground tunnels.

read more: 16 Best Fall Reads

Because Winterson knows that the heart of the story is in Mary’s life, pockmarked by so much loss, and in her frankly incredible writing process. Instead of the two Frankensteins, the interweaving duo in this book is writer Mary Shelley and Ry Shelley, a trans doctor who finds himself falling for the charismatic, otherworldly transhumanist Victor Stein. Winterson lays out the blueprints for the story by first visiting Mary, her husband Percy, the insufferable Lord Byron, her bimbo stepsister Claire, and the awkward Doctor Polidari at that life-changing rainy weekend writing retreat on Lake Geneva—which, honestly, has all the makings of a Mary Shelley biopic right there. Then, once you know enough about the characters, Winterson leaps ahead 200 years to the familiar strangers of Ry, Victor, and sex robot designer Ron Lord and his perky creation Claire.

Frankissstein is a creepy, sexy, soggy, surprisingly hilarious demonstration of how time is just a circle and history repeats itself. Except this time with cryogenically frozen millionaires and filthy-mouthed pleasure bots.

- Natalie Zutter

Read Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

Protect the Prince by Jennifer Estep

I may have raved a little bit last year about Jennifer Estep's series launcher Kill the Queen. Estep has written in a number of genres over her career, but Kill the Queen showed me that epic fantasy is her true home; it went delightfully above my expectations, creating Evie, a compelling protagonist who's both a reluctant hero and a natural one: she takes risks for others without thought and only truly fears her own destiny, because for years she's been convinced that she's not worth claiming a loftier mantle. There's also a gladiator troupe, shapeshifting magic that creates a whole new mold for what those powers can look like, and some excellent romantic tension and humor.

Estep's sequel, Protect the Prince, raises the stakes, thrusting Evie deeper into the intrigue between kingdoms as she hopes to forge a lasting peace, while also driving a wedge between her and her love interest, a bastard prince who—like Evie—has been told his whole life he'll never amount to much. Evie must manage the nobles of her own kingdom, prevent war with other nations, and fight against the constant sabotage of power-hungry Mortan king, whose spies have been plaguing Evie's life even longer than she realized, and who are continuing to try to kill her.

Even as Evie sets her own plans into action, playing the long game against her enemies, the story leaves room for romance and friendship, and for Evie to find a way to become the Winter Queen everyone expects her to be. The trilogy wraps in March, 2020, with Crush the King, and you can bet I've already got that on preorder.

- Alana Joli-Abbott

Read Protect the Prince by Jennifer Estep

Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes

The book lays it out for you right away: Evvie (her name rhymes with Chevy) was leaving her husband when she got the call that he had died. That emotional quagmire is where NPR's Linda Holmes, host of Pop Culture Happy Hour, plants her witty and warm romantic comedy of a novel. Evvie rents out a room in her house in Maine to Dean, a former Major League Baseball pitcher hiding out from the world after he left the game when he woke up one day with a bad case of the yips and simply couldn't throw anymore.

Grounded in the complicated reality of grief, the book has so much to say about platonic mixed-gender best friends, single parenting, re-learning how to relate to parents as an adult, and life in a small town. There's so much room in the world for smartly written adult romance, and Holmes knows how to bring the heat when she wants to. Yes, it's a romance, but there are no short cuts, easy answers, or guarantees of a perfect happy ending. Evvie and Dean test one another emotionally in ways that feel organic to their characters, rather than plot-driven, and their victories are earned on the page. Charming, hopeful, and with great emotional depth, reading Evvie Drake Starts Over means getting all the joy of a romcom without having to sacrifice on quality or consent.

- Delia Harrington

Read Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes

Giraffes on Horseback Salad by Josh Frank & Tim Heidecker

The Marx Brothers were at the peak of their popularity when Salvador Dalí presented then with a screenplay called "The Surrealist Woman." It was only a few pages and they turned it down for not being funny enough, but it still carries mythical significance in both the art world and cinema history. Josh Frank's graphic novel Giraffes on Horseback Salad fleshes out the sparse notes to present the how the film would have looked on the screen.

Giraffes on Horseback Salad is a love story. But the world hangs in the loss of balance. The book includes a preface which tells the story of the artists relationships with each other and placing the film them in a historic context. It would have been made after A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races, which were produced by Irving Thalberg, who died before this would have been up for consideration and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer declared it too expensive and too surreal. There are quite a few surprises.

The biggest is Harpo speaks. Not only does he speak but people hang on to his every word. Gone are the curly locks and tattered overcoat. Here Harpo’s Jimmy is an important man who wears impressive suits and has an A-list significant other who ultimately pales in significance to the lady of surrealism. The illustrations by Spanish surrealistic artist Manuela Pertega, capture what could have been possible to put on the screens. The surrealistic jokes added by comedian Tim Heidecker may explain why Groucho passed on the work, but you can see the magic such a film may have conjured. Even the name of the book's publisher, Quirk, feeds into the skewered reality.

- Tony Sokol

Read Giraffes on Horseback Salad by Josh Frank and Tim Heidecker

Read and download the Den of Geek Lost In Space Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Feature Kayti Burt Alana Joli Abbott Delia Harrington Megan Crouse Tony Sokol Lacy Baugher Natalie Zutter

Dec 30, 2019

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#aion-rsa #Books

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thatoneaceinthecorner · 5 years

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Tag Game: About the Author

I was tagged by @jaywrites101, I love your blog and thank you!

Rules of the game: Answer these questions and tag blogs you’d like to know better.

Nickname: Hmm. I don’t know that I really have a nickname? My younger sister calls me Loki but that’s about it. My parents still call me a little abbreviation of my first name sometimes, and so does my oldest friend, but most people just use my name.

Zodic: Scorpio. I don’t really believe in zodiac stuff, but I do fit pretty much every aspect of my sign except the high sex drive thing. I’m asexual, so that’s definitely inaccurate, but everything else is pretty close.

Height: 5’ 9”. But I’ve been inspired by Jenna Marbles and have decided to grow four or five more inches. No one can stop me.

Time: It’s 2:27 in the afternoon. I just got home from a doctor’s appointment and getting an IV treatment. I’m tired, but that’s a permanent fixture of my existence.

Favorite band/artist: I’m one of those people who has a playlist full of random songs of different genres that I happened to like becuase either they tell a story, or have some other emotional draw, rather than having all the songs be a specific artist. However, I do tend to enjoy Barnes Courtney, Imagine Dragons, Panic! and few others pretty consistently. Also I listen to a lot of obscure showtunes (Death Note, Hadestown, etc.)

Song stuck in my head: Lately it’s been Avicii’s cover of Feeling Good.

Last movie I saw: Avengers Endgame. I cried. Several times. And I don’t usually cry at movies.

[Edit: Fuck that movie. It was terrible.]

Last thing I googled: The Norwegian word for wonderous. For a writing project. (It’s vidunderlig, if you’re curious.)

Other blogs: @mustbewriting is my brand new writeblr.

Do I get asks: I have gotten exactly one ask. Though it wasn’t actually a question, it was a comment about how my username reminded them of a song.

Why this username: Honestly it was just the first thing that popped into my head. Also it’s accurate.

Following: Only 81 blogs, now that I look at it. I’m just here to goof off, if I like your stuff I’ll definitely follow you but I don’t actively engage a ton. I’d like to, I’m just not very good at it.

Averge amount of sleep: As much as I can get. I’m chronically ill, so I’m at home all the time. I go to bed around ten and get up around eleven. I don’t sleep that whole time, but if I get much less than that I’m even more of a groggy mess than I’d normally be.

Lucky number: 11 and 13.

What I’m wearing: Black t-shirt with a Doctor Who quote on it, black pants, black and grey argyle compression socks. Usually I’d be wearing pajamas, but since I just got home from the doctor I’m still dressed.

Dream job: I’d like to be an at least marginally successful novelist, making enough to support myself comfortably. I’m going to write books whether I get paid for it or not, but getting paid well for doing what I love would be spectacular.

Dream trip: I’d like to traipse around Europe, taking as much time as I want without having to worry about the cost. And when I say Europe, I mean all the way from the tip of Portugal, through every European county, around the UK, up into Norway and Finland and Sweden, and all the way down to Greece and Turkey.

Favorite food: Oh, this is hard. I have so many dietary restrictions it’s hard to come up wit a “normal meal” that actually gets me excited. I think I’ll just go with really dark chocolate. That’s a food, right? Anyway, it’s the thing I eat with the most consistency.

Instruments I play: Guitar, ukulele, a bit of mandolin, and some piano. I can’t read music, and I’m self taught, so my skill pretty much extends to any song I like and can find chords/a tutorial for.

Eye color: They can’t really decide between blue, green, and grey. They could be any of the above with an -ish added to the end.

Hair color: It’s brown on my birth certificate, but often people refer to it as blond. I don’t know. It’s an odd burnt honey color, I suppose.

Aesthetic: Hmm. For colors, that would be black, dark green, silver ... I’m a slytherin, so something along those lines. As far as clothes go, I’d rock a sharp black suit, no tie, with my silver snake earrings and black boots. Maybe an infinity symbol pinned to my lapel.

Languages I speak: English is my first language. I’m learning Norwegian, I speak a tiny bit of Spanish, I have an array of random Italian vocabulary, and I used to study Latin, so I have all the major Latin roots still floating around in my head.

Most iconic song: Sinners by Barnes Courtney.

Random fact: About me? My younger sister has designated me ‘Protector of the Crawlies,’ becuase I rescue spiders that have wandered into our house. The rule is that if I name a spider, she isn’t allowed to kill it. Most recently I liberated a spider that was chilling on my desk, and another (very tiny) that was for some reason hanging from the lense of my glasses. I’m starting to think that they like me.

Tagging: I’m not super active within the tumblr community, so I don’t know a lot of folks, but here’s my list:

@kirschteins-delivery-service @kissgiirls @smallnico @aro-ace-from-outer-space22 @thebibliosphere @thorlokibrother @headspace-hotel @gayandgoodatmath @owl-writes @swordsdippedinshadows @galexy-eevee

#tag game #chronically ill writer

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reesewestonarchive · 6 years

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10 questions tags

so in my absence I ended up with something like... fifty tags? a lot of tags. and they’re now all in my reading list and I’m going to draft them all so I can read and reblog and reply and whatnot, but holy shit, you guys keep busy.

I’m not tagging back because this is really long haha

tagged by @sleepy-and-anxious for questions

Do you have a writing routine?

noooooo lol. I don’t even write when inspiration strikes, haha.

Early bird or night owl?

usually I’m awake at night? but having a scheduled job that needs me at eight am tries to put me to bed at a more reasonable hour haha

Who is your least favourite oc? Tell me about them.

...ooh. jon, probably, though even he has badly-justified reasons for doing what he does. maybe one of his clients, because there’s no good reason for them doing what they do, just that they do. (also I just... don’t like to talk about them haha)

How do you come up with plot ideas?

who knows! how do I come up with anything? I consume a lot of media, and it used to be that any time I’d watch a movie I’d be hit with inspiration. now my anxiety doesn’t let me watch a lot of movies so there goes that idea

Do you make playlists for your wip?

I do! oftentimes they suck or have very flimsy ties to my wip but hey

What software/type of document etc do you write on?

pages, evernote now apparently, also notes, because before I had pages on both my phone and my computer I wanted the cloud to help me keep shit straight. I used to email it to myself if I wrote on my phone... that was not fun haha

Do you like to gush about your wip or keep it secret?

a little of both? from the roof of my mouth gets talked about a lot. shadowed’s a little more secret just because it’s darker and I’m concerned no one’s going to want to hear about it?

If you could pick one song to describe your wip what would it be?

everlong :p

Did you make a writeblr for any specific reason?

I just wanted to connect with other writers? and it’s been great, up until my own bullshit made that difficult haha

also tagged by @writerachel

what are your top 3 favorite movies?

can’t hardly wait, back to the future, and... oh. I blanked.

do you listen to music when you write?

not usually. from the roof of the mouth is the first time I’ve been able to in a while, at least stuff that isn’t instrumental.

who’s your favorite character from any book you’ve ever read?

oh. um. ...that’s a very good question.

what’s your favorite line from your current wip?

less of a line and more of a passage, but when Nakoa uses the ‘dicey’ pun on dice’s nickname. also the ““I love you,” he says, and his voice holds steady.”

which of your current wips would you want to be a movie? (IF YOU HAVE ONLY ONE WIP: what book would you want to turn into a movie?)

well. that’s a good question. uhh.

do you have anything/anyone in your life that influences/inspires your writing?

other writers here, and I’m lying if I don’t say raven specifically haha. otherwise, I mean, not really? I don’t write based on my own life because I get anxiety about it.

starbucks or dunkin donuts? (I HAVE TO KNOW I’M SORRY!!)

I drink dunkin donuts coffee at home so I guess them? haha

can you write anywhere or do you have to be in a specific place?

nah I can write anywhere. apparently my favorite is when I’m trying to fall asleep though

worst book you were forced to read in school?

the alchemist. I also don’t care for to kill a mockingbird, and I read it twice for school

do you have any pets?

I do! some kitties!

tagged by @quill-and-ink-writer

What is your favorite time to write?

at night, hahaha.

Is there a book you would rewrite? If so, how?

I feel like I’ve been asked this before, and honestly... I don’t usually think like that? like I read books and usually they’re either good or great, ‘cause I don’t finish books I don’t like haha

Have any specific authors influenced your work?

I’m sure they have but I couldn’t name them.

Where do you draw inspiration?

from other media, other writers. I already mentioned one in particular up there :p

What’s your style/voice?

...? I don’t know?

Which of your OCs could become your best friend?

oh. um. I think I’d get along well with dice, or aero. nakoa’s probably too rowdy, haha. otherwise, there’s a character in autumn moon I’ve yet to introduce that’d fit the bill.

What’s the last book you read?

our bloody pearl by brynwrites which was way better than I expected (which isn’t to say that I didn’t expect it to be great but I was enamored through the day as I read it)

Are you proud or anxious when other people read your writing?

anxious, hahaha. I am never proud.

Do you nail down a character’s personality before you write, or do you prefer to let it grow in the story?

I try to nail it down. nakoa was supposed to be way more laid back and chill and his story was much less heartbreaking, but alas that’s what first drafts and rewrites do to you

Where’s your favorite place to write?

in bed, apparently

also tagged by @trevorparece

Standalones, trilogies, or behemoths of a series?

if I’m writing it, standalones. if I’m reading it, I like things that have more than one installment, because then it gives more opportunities for other people to get into it and then I can live in the world a little longer :p

What is your favorite line of your own writing?

oh, man. I don’t know. I write a lot of garbage.

What would your book’s epigraph be?

I’m really irritated that I can’t answer this question because it’s a very good question

How about its movie poster slogan?

AUGH THIS ONE TOO

If you were going to challenge yourself to try something new, what genre would you venture into?

scifi, lol. I already am trying it. it’s not my forte.

Who’s the first person you show a draft to?

me! just me. I don’t usually work in drafts so I’m nervous about it.

Is there an idea (be it plot or character or world) you’ve been tugging along since childhood, just waiting for the right moment to use?

nahhh. I either write them down and forget, forget them, or start writing them.

What’s the first creative thing you remember writing, and what did you learn from it?

something about aliens, or possibly a fantasy book that was meant to be a series? honestly--that it was easier to write than I thought it was.

What’s the strangest characteristic you’ve taken from real life and given to a character (could be yours or someone else’s)?

oh, I don’t know, haha. I don’t do this consciously. I’m sure I’ve done it, but I wouldn’t know I did it :p

Choose your fighter: Enemies to Lovers, There’s Only One Bed, or Pretend Dating Makes Real Feelings.

PRETEND DATING. fake dating is my most favorite thing

and @editedandwrittenbyhannah

How old were you when you started taking writing seriously (assuming you do now)?

guess it depends on the definition of serious. if it means publishing, it’s been back and forth because I don’t always want to publish, and I don’t always think everything I write could BE published. if it means attempting to write true to characters and plot and whatever, then... always?

How old do you think is the best age to start writing and why?

whenever. if the story’s in your mind and your heart, then put it to paper. you can always grow older and change it, if it needs to be, but there’s no such thing as ‘too old’ or ‘too young’ to start writing.

What is your ideal setting for writing?

in bed, before I fall asleep, lol. this is a popular question :p

What is the weirdest thing that has ever gotten your writer brain going on overdrive about a new idea?

oh. I don’t know. I don’t question inspiration these days, haha.

Do you edit before you post your writing to tumblr?

sometimes. actually, no, usually. and then I forget that I edited it. and it doesn’t make it back to my draft. don’t be like me.

What blogs have inspired you AND/OR motivated you to write? Tag ‘em so they know what they did for you.

@forlornraven @indecentpause @infinitelyblankpage @riftversus @lavenderas @theshadowsofthenight, but also, kind of the entirety of writeblr as a whole is good. I dig this community and watching everyone craft their stories has been kind of incredible. I don’t know writer people in real life, so the internet’s kind of how I find them, and I haven’t had a community of sorts since I was in high school. it’s nice to see everyone so determined and in love with their own work. reminds me it’s okay to not hate my stuff.

Who is your favorite tumblr writer?

...look I’m just gonna say I mentioned them by name already :p but the ones I mentioned in the question just before this are equally as awesome.

I just realized technically I mentioned all of writeblr. look how that works out :p

What is your favorite topic to write about? Read about?

I don’t know, I like contemporary fiction, stuff that’s realistic to write about because it’s the world I most know, obviously, and I’m used to reading about lgbt+ characters and a lot of the times those aren’t in genre fiction--at least not mainstream genre fiction)

or they weren’t, anyway.

but I like scifi too.

How old were you when you read your favorite book for the first time? How many times have you read it since then?

I don’t know that I have a favorite book. if it is, probably room, and I don’t really know lol

List 3 songs that you would NEVER listen to while writing because they’re too distracting for any reason at all.

all of them. ;;

#tag games #sorry mobile

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releasing-my-insanity · 3 years

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Rare Pair Exchange Letter

Hey guys, I’m participating in the rare pair exchange and this is my letter. (Also good if anyone really wants to write me a fic. Haha) Under the cut for length.

Hello content creator. I’m glad you’ve joined this exchange. I’m sure I’ll love anything you make. Obviously nothing in here is required except for DNWs. I just like to provide information and suggestions in case they’re helpful. Largely copied from other exchange letters.

General fic likes:

Fluff.

Humor.

Kindness and helping others.

Cuddles and snuggles.

Cozy scenes.

Bedsharing.

Casual touching.

Little soft and/or quiet moments between friends or significant others.

Characters sharing a love of music or movies or books or hobbies.

Pet owners.

Cute kids when those kids are canon children of requested characters.

Living together, either platonically or romantically.

People being really good at what they do and their friends/partners being impressed.

Characters who speak languages other than English slipping into those languages occasionally.

Teaching each other.

Communities supporting each other.

Everyone being accepting of the characters and their differences and/or relationships.

Women who get stuff done.

Bi and Ace-spectrum Headcanons.

Shippy stuff:

Soulmates (both common and creative varieties),

The Soulmate Goose of Enforcement,

Polyamory.

Friends to lovers.

Rivals to lovers.

Annoying each other constantly to lovers.

Established relationships.

Couples knowing each other really well and doing things the other one likes just because.

“Man I really love my wife” guys.

Asking before kissing someone.

Stopping a kiss or a touch immediately when asked.

Surprise kisses in an established relationship.

Weddings.

Platonic/familial stuff:

Becoming friends.

Insta-friends,

Female Friendship

Friends who stay friends (they don’t become romantic and they don’t stop enjoying each other’s company).

Found families.

True companions.

Healthy families of origin.

DNWs:

Any sort of death (Exception under Highway to Heaven.)

Abuse of any sort.

Anything that AO3 has under major warnings.

Unhealthy relationships.

Character bashing.

Explicit sex (implied or referenced sex between consenting adults is fine).

Illness beyond the common cold.

Mpreg.

Non-canonical pregnancy.

Discrimination or bigotry unless in the context of characters working to end it.

Unhappy ending.

General vid likes:

Songs with lyrics are my preference, but if you have the absolute most perfect instrumental song, go for it.

I absolutely adore when songs match with the visuals. Clips that follow the lyrics, a story that is told through the video, or just a song that is chosen because it fits the characters.

Specific lyrics that relate to the pairing > Generic love song.

Music: I like a wide range of genres but I particularly love 20s-40s Big Band, Early Jazz, Doo-Wop, 50s-70s Classic Rock, Motown, Classic Musicals, Tom Chapin, and Postmodern Jukebox.

With fandoms set in the past I especially enjoy videos set to period accurate songs or Postmodern Jukebox in the style of songs from that period.

General vid dislikes:

Rap or Hip Hop (Nothing wrong with them, the beats just tend to hurt my head.)

The screaming kind of music. Again, it hurts my head.

Videos where the song doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the characters, canon, or video.

Fandom Specific: (Optional Prompts are mostly fic related)

All Creatures Great And Small (2020):

Fandom Content Notes: It’s a show about vets so there is some animal death. Backstories include mentions of character death, racism, and hinted at abuse.

Pairings requested: Anne/Bert, Dorothy/Mrs. Hall, Dorothy/Mrs. Hall/Siegfried, Helen/James, James/Tristan, Maggie/Tristan

Tumblr Tag for Fandom: All Creatures Great And Small

Fandom Specific Likes: Helen/James/Tristan/Maggie as an N relationship. Helen and Tristan having a very brother-sister like relationship. Helen and Hugh staying friends. Helen and Maggie being friends and having other female friends. James’ chances for success at helping animals seeming to go up when Helen or Tristan is supporting him. Siegfried being accepting of pretty much everything and expressing it in very brisk ways.

Fandom Specific Dislikes: Pregnancy or parenting fics unless the focus is Anne/Bert. Helen and James getting together before she properly breaks up with Hugh. Any appearance of Mrs. Hall’s abusive ex.

Optional Prompts by Pairing:

Anne/Bert: I love Anne and Bert so much. Their whole relationship gives me great joy and Anne is definitely my favorite character. Anything you want to make for these two would be incredible. I’m especially interested in the early days of their relationship, how they fell in love and decided not to fight their feelings. Obviously if you go that route there was a lot of racism they had to deal with, but I would prefer it not be a focus. I’d also be happy to see something set during their marriage.

Dorothy/Mrs. Hall: I would love to hear about their relationship while they were in the Wrens together. Did they meet in the Wrens or did they know each other beforehand? Anything set in canon or later would be lovely as well. When did they realize their feelings? Who fell first?

I am obsessed with the idea of Siegfried being their beard. Maybe he’s actually happy to not find someone else, so he marries Dorothy. Then Dorothy and Mrs. Hall live like the happy couple they are. To outsiders Dorothy and Siegfried are happily married and Mrs. Hall is the housekeeper. But everyone living in Skeldale House knows that Dorothy and Mrs. Hall are in love.

Dorothy/Mrs. Hall/Siegfried: Not exactly a prompt, but if it’s helpful my ideal dynamic for this ship is the Lesbian-Centric Semi-Nonsexual Trouple. I see them as being a healthy triad where each pair connects in a different way and they just enjoy being around each other. I’d love to see how they get together or some established relationship.

I quite like the idea of Mrs. Hall and Dorothy both feeling caught between their growing feelings for Siegfried and their long-running feelings for each other. Meanwhile Siegfried is realizing that he has feelings for both of them and in the end no one has to choose.

Helen/James: I just want to see these two be a couple without having to deal with the fallout of Helen leaving Hugh at the alter. Maybe Helen breaks up with Hugh sooner and she and James share their first kiss at Anne and Bert’s over the puppies. Or they go on a date sometime after the Christmas special. Something that takes place after they’re married would be lovely as well. Although anything going into Helen’s thoughts as she finds herself falling for James would also be fun.

James/Tristan: I saw the clip where they’re hiding from Siegfried and laughing and my first thought was “They’re going to fall in love aren’t they?” I just really love their best friends dynamic and the way they encourage each other into trouble. But I also love how they support each other. I see the romantic part of their relationship as having a lot of snuggles and kisses. For a prompt it could be fun to see them ending up having to share a bed for some reason.

Maggie/Tristan: I don’t have a specific prompt but I really like the idea of their relationship helping them both to grow as people. I’d love to see more of Tristan interacting with David and Maggie falling for how good her boyfriend is with her little brother. Something where they’ve been together for a while and are finally ready to say “I love you” could be very sweet.

Highway to Heaven:

Fandom Content Notes: A wide range of injustice and discrimination appear throughout the show. Within the episodes relevant to these ships there’s character death, a suicide attempt, and some ableism.

Pairings requested: Jane | Jennifer/Jonathan, Stella/Mark, Diane/Scotty

Tumblr Tag for Fandom: Highway to Heaven

Fandom Specific Likes: Jonathan is an angel but sometimes he’s still painfully human. (E.G. Getting too emotionally involved with an assignment, his crisis of faith in We Have Forever, his reaction to Mark getting hurt in Going Home, Going Home.) I just really like that Jonathan isn’t perfect and makes mistakes and has strong emotions just like the rest of us.

Exception to no character death: I’m okay with mentions of it in relation to Jonathan and Jane, or Stella, but I don’t want it to be the focus or the ending. I need to see them as angels afterwards if their deaths come up.

Fandom Specific DNW: Ignoring the fact that Scotty is quadriplegic. Making the entire story about Scotty being quadriplegic as though it’s his only trait. Not a hugely important thing, but I would prefer Jonathan and Jennifer not sleep together (except literally) since he doesn’t know that she’s Jane.

Optional Prompts by pairing:

Jonathan/Jane: I am down with basically any story for these two that you want to tell.

How they fell in love. Scenes from their marriage. Missing scenes between the two in Keep Smiling.

What it was like for Jane to become Jennifer and be given the first assignment of helping her husband regain his faith? A missing scene from their two months together.

Something where they meet again later, either between assignments, sharing an assignment, or being reunited in heaven when they’ve both earned their wings.

Scotty/Diane: A Match Made in Heaven is my absolute favorite episode, I would love literally anything based on it. For a video you’re welcome to use content from any or all of their episodes of course, but I would also be just as happy with one based entirely on this episode.

I’d also love the missing scene of their wedding, or scenes from their married life, or something with them being parents.

Mark/Stella: I’d love to see scenes from their time together or something where The Boss lets them see each other again. I would absolutely adore something where Mark meets Stella’s adult daughter.

Sesame Street:

Pairings requested: Linda/Bob, Maria/Linda, Maria/Luis, Maria/David, Harriet/Mr. Hooper, Susan/Gordon, Mr. Macintosh/Willy, Maria/Luis/David, Susan/Gordon/Bob, Bob/David/Linda/Luis/Maria/Olivia

Tumblr Tag for Fandom: Sesame Street

Fandom Specific Likes: Mr. Hooper lives. No one ages. The characters making sure to sign for Linda so that she knows what’s going on. Miles and Gabi being best friends. Bob and Maria being metamours and having a very sibling-like relationship. Mr. Hooper refusing to tell anyone what his orientation is. Big Bird basically being everyone’s child. Bob being in both of the above polyamorous relationships at the same time.

Fandom Specific DNW: Anything involving the death of Mr. Hooper. Making Linda hearing instead of Deaf.

Optional Prompts by Pairing:

All of these pairings I’d be happy with anything you want to write but here are a few thoughts.

Linda/Bob: If they had gotten married, what would their wedding look like? What kind of dates do they go on?

According to episode summaries on The Muppet wiki, Bob writes songs for Linda and she teaches him American Sign Language. I would love to see either or both of those things.

Maria/Linda: When Linda first arrives on Sesame Street, Maria is the person who’s the most fluent in ASL and that leads to her and Linda becoming friends quickly. Linda learning some Spanish sign language so she and Maria can both speak Spanish.

Harriet/Mr. Hooper: Based on reading the Muppet wiki, I got the feeling that David’s Grandma Harriet and Mr. Hooper are quietly dating and I would love to see more of that. In season 11 Mr. Hooper, Mr. Macintosh, and Willy took Harriet to a dance. How did that go? Did they start dating after that?

Mr. Macintosh/Willy: My headcanon is that they’re basically the street’s gay uncles. They’re been together for basically forever and everyone adores them. They’re also Mr. Hooper’s best friends. I’d love to see how they got together when they were younger.

Susan/Gordon: I would dearly love some fic about how they met and fell in love. Or a fic about how they decided that they were ready to be parents and that they wanted to adopt. Maybe something with them geeking out together over science.

Maria/David/Luis: The only logical solution to the Maria/David, Maria/Luis relationships. I actually shipped David/Luis before I shipped Maria/David, so I definitely view this as a full triad.

How do they get together? Are two of them together first and then the third joins them? Or do they become a triad all at once? What do their dates as a triad look like? Do the three of them ever go dancing?

How do they decide to get married? To become parents? Does it matter which of Maria’s husbands is Gabi’s biological father or do they only know for medical history reasons?

Maria/Luis or Maria/David: I don’t have anything specific for these, but I thought I would ask for them anyway.

Susan/Gordon/Bob: Did they know each other before Sesame Street or did they meet there? When did they get together? One thing I really like is the idea of them having gone to college together and getting up to hijinks. I would love to see some of that. How involved is Bob in parenting Miles?

Bob/David/Linda/Luis/Maria/Olivia: The ship of my heart. My personal perspective is that every part of this relationship is romantic except for Bob and Maria. Bob and Maria adore each other but their relationship with each other is platonic.

Do they ever manage to all share a bed comfortably or are there too many of them and someone ends up on the floor? The six of them go out on date and are mistaken for being three couples so they try to see how obvious they can make it that it’s all six of them. Is it ever hard to parent Gabi when there are six parents?

Singin’ In The Rain:

Pairings requested: Kathy/Don/Cosmo

Tumblr Tag for Fandom: Singin’ In The Rain

Fandom Specific Likes: Cosmo being Aro-Ace. The relationship being queerplatonic at least in regards to Cosmo. The characters randomly breaking into song and dance like in canon.

Fandom Specific Dislikes: The common fanon that Cosmo and/or Don had abusive families.

Optional Prompts: I actually don’t really have anything specific here. I just think that the world always needs more of these three.

WordGirl:

Pairings requested: Becky/Violet/Tobey/Scoops, TJ/Johnson

Tumblr Tag for Fandom: WordGirl

Fandom Specific Likes: Tobey realizing that he’s loved. Tobey’s robots being sweet. Becky getting to tell Tobey that she’s WordGirl on her own terms. Becky feeling comfortable telling her family that she’s WordGirl.

Fandom Specific Dislikes: Angst. These are children so I’d prefer they not show affection with anything more than a handhold or maybe a kiss on the cheek, unless they’re aged up.

Optional Prompts by Pairing: I’m happy with any kind of cute content for either of these pairings. I would especially like to see a get together.

I also read a fic once where Becky and TJ were allowed to invite their friends on a Botsford family trip to a cabin on a lake. Scoops and Violet couldn’t go in the fic, but I keep wondering what it would be like if they did and Becky was there with her mutual crushes and TJ was there with his.

#Rare Pair Exchange #Dear Creator Letters

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queertheology · 7 years

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Practical next steps on your Christian journey

So you’re a Christian? Now what?

For the past month at Queer Theology, we’ve been taking a look at the fundamentals of Christianity — and of what it means to be an LGBTQ+ person of faith. We’ve sorted through everything from myths and misconceptions to downright toxic theology and we’ve tried to get at the heart of what it means to be a Christian.

Here’s what we’ve covered so far:

Back to the (queer Christian) basics

What do we do with the Bible?

The Exodus didn’t happen. The Exodus is true.

What does it mean to be a Christian?

The generosity of God

Building a Bible-based faith (that isn’t terrible)

a live webinar on the basics of Christianity (you can get access to it, and our entire webinar archive, in Sanctuary Collective)

But so what? What do you do with all this knowledge?

My junior high youth group director Dave used to tell us, “If you really believe in Jesus, that can’t help but change your life.”

Here are some practical next steps as you continue to pursue a (queer) Christian faith.

Not everyone has to believe the same as you.

Some conservative branches of Christianity are keen on making sure that everyone believes the same thing. There is one way to interpret each and every Bible passage. There is one correct way to relate to Jesus, one correct way to understand salvation, one correct everything.

The math-science nerd in me understands this: there is one law for gravity, 1 plus 1 does equal 2, human reproduction happens in a certain, observable way.

But, even in science, there is so much we don’t know. And so much that varies from person to person, experience to experience. You might work best alone in an office while your neighbor might work best from a crowded coffeeshop. You might be motivated by comfort while your friend might be motivated by fame.

We each experience and understand the world in different ways, and that’s a beautiful thing.

Sometimes it’s helpful to ask “what is right” as best we can know. Sometimes we can look to science for answers (vaccines really will protect your child, comprehensive sexual education really does help keep teenagers safe, the earth really does revolve around the sun).

But sometimes, when it comes to matters of faith or of the heart, “is it right?” doesn’t always have a clear answer (even if it feels so clear to you or me!). In those cases, “is it helpful?” is often a good question to ask. When that is the question, it’s possible to answer “yes” to lots of different questions. They can compliment each other, rather than compete with one another.

When it comes to the nature of God, the resurrection, and even what-happens-after-you-die, Fr. Shay and I often believe differently. But we can look at each of our beliefs, ask “Is it helpful?,” and see that the answer is yes.

Jesus models this in Scripture when he tells his followers to judge the tree of a theology by its fruits. Good theology bears good fruits.

If your theology — or someone else’s theology — is bearing bad fruit … that may be a reason to speak out or act up. But if it’s just different than yours? That’s ok.

Not every problem you face is a spiritual one

We believe in the power of God. A God that parts seas to set oppressed people freeand who defeats death. We believe that the divine dwells in you, too. And that you are capable of remarkable things.

It’s also important that we recognize that not every problem you face is a spiritual one — sometimes you need secular solutions.

Too often we receive messages from folks who have been told that their gender dysphoria is a result of their sin or that their depression or suicidal thoughts can be cured with prayer.

God works through doctors and therapists and nutritionists just as much as God works through priests and pastors.

Sometimes you need a doctor. Or a therapist. Or a nutritionist. You might need medicine or light therapy or daily exercise.

If you come from a conservative religious background, working with a therapist to unpack that experience and develop healthier, more productive ways of moving through the world can be hugely helpful. I cannot recommend it enough. If you think you can’t afford therapy, talk with your local LGBT center… they may be able to connect you with some low- or no-cost options. Also, check out this Twitter thread for options and alternatives.

It’s important that you think through how your faith and beliefs will affect your actions

It’s all well and good to have beliefs but how do those beliefs affect your life—your choices and your actions (and your inactions)? James 2:17 even says, pointedly, “faith is dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity.”

We see throughout the scriptures — and in the example of believers throughout the ages — the importance of putting your faith into action. God asked Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. The divine became incarnate in Jesus and then walked, talked, ate, touched (and led direct action protests).

If we take Jesus at his word that he came to “preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed,” and if we understand that he asked those around him to follow him … then what will faithful actions look like in our lives?

Here are some questions for you think about:

what will I do with my money?

how will I take care of others?

in what ways can I speak truth to powers and principalities that they would take care of their people?

how will I treat others?

where will I worship?

where will I live? (and with whom?)

how will I spend my time?

what will I think about myself?

what will I think about others?

If your Christian faith is important to you, take the time and energy to grow in it

As Christians, we don’t get to download everything that we need to know from The Matrix and be instant experts, even Jesus studied at the temple.

If the Christian faith is important to you, set aside the time and energy to grow in it. Read books, listen to talks, audit classes, speak with experts. You don’t need a seminary degree to be a faithful Christian, of course, but there is something to be said about really studying the theology around your faith if that faith is important to you. (Need somewhere to get started? We have a whole class on how to read the Bible)

I’m a big fan of 1 Thessalonians 5:21 — “test everything; hold fast to that which is good” — it was instrumental in allowing me to question what I’d been taught about “homosexuality and the Bible” … but it doesn’t end there. Test everything. Your beliefs about God, prayer, salvation, about the outsider and the other, about hell, sin, grace, and more. (we take a robust look at 26 different topics over 13 issues of Spit & Spirit — you get a subscription to the magazine with Sanctuary Collective)

Find a community

Where two are more are gathered, there God is (Matthew 18:20). Something divine happens in community: here’s enough to eat (Matthew 14), there are no needy (Acts 2).

Whether your community is online or IRL, it’s important to get connected with a community of folks who believe like you and share your values.

To find community in real life:

GayChurch.org maintains a list of LGBTQ-affirming churches

Connect with the LGBTQ+ organization for a specific denomination for suggestions on where to worship. Those are

More Light Presbyterians

Reconciling Ministries Network

Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists

Dignity (Roman Catholic)

Integrity (Episcopalian)

Affirmation (Latter Day Saints)

Reconciling Works

Room for All (Reform Church of America)

To find community online:

Connect on the #FaithfullyLGBT and #QueerTheology hashtags on Twitter

Search for “gay Christian” on Tumblr or track the gay christian hashtag

Join Sanctuary Collective, an online community of LGBTQ+ Christians and straight, cisngeder supporters from around the world and across denominations (including some seekers and skeptics)

It’s ok to not be a Christian

It’s also possible that you’ll take a hard look at what it means to be a Christian and decide it’s not for you. That you don’t align with its values, that its beliefs are too different from your own, that you don’t want to be associated with the label, or that its caused you too much trauma and it’s just not safe for you. That’s ok.

It is OK to not be a Christian.

You can be a good, righteous, moral person and not be a Christian.

You can love God and not be a Christian (it’s also OK if you’re angry at God! or don’t believe in God).

And as Christian leaders, we’re here to tell you that God doesn’t think any less of you if you never step foot in a church begin because it’s triggering, if you don’t feel God’s presence, if you have major doubts, if you don’t believe.

We find Christianity to be a liberating and life-giving faith and we believe God wants you to be liberated and saved. If you find that somewhere, go with gusto!

What are some ways that you’ve put your faith into action? Reply or reblog!

#queer theology #gay christian #faithfully lgbt #christianity #born again #salvation #god #bible #jesus #christ #jesus christ #lgbtq #lgbt

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abjectionproductions-blog · 8 years

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An Interview with Interregnum

Could you introduce the group? Who you are and what you do in Interregnum?

Gregory: The idea for the project has been evolving for around two years. Joshua and I met through Tumblr, when he submitted a collection of short stories to Cutlines Press (I was acting as co-editor). It turned out that we shared so many interests, from music and literature to occultism, that we began working on a publication that came out last December, a literary collection called Collapsed Cartographies. [http://www.cutlinespress.com/category/e-book/] Other authors and artists contributed, and Joshua and I recorded an album to go along with the literary material. [https://collapsedcartographies.bandcamp.com/album/collapsed-cartogrophies]. In the group I do vocals, synth, harmonium, stick dulcimer, bells, rattles, field recordings and samples, etc…

Joshua: Hello, there. My name is Josh. I play things in Interregnum, I suppose. I sample stuff as well. Gregory and I kind of play everything. I don’t think we have set roles in the project. He plays the harmonium. I can’t play that. Or, at least I don’t own one. It’s my favorite part of our sound, though.

What's the origin of the project? Why the name Interregnum?

Gregory: As I said, we began with a pretty ambitious literary collaboration, and that has grown into Interregnum as a specific musical outlet. The word “interregnum” means an interval or pause, and especially a period between reigns, of governmental transition. I first encountered the word around a year ago, and have found it increasingly useful in terms of political analysis. I think that, globally, we are definitely in a disorienting situation, where the coordinates of the 20th century (the Cold War, for example), are no longer adequate. I came of age during the era of the Bush administration in the U.S, which was a time when it looked like the U.S. was going to be able to set the agenda for the world, on the heels of the 90s boom, and so on. Now—after the global financial crisis, the failure of U.S. imperial policy (reminiscent of the decline of Soviet power, e.g., in their inability to control Afghanistan) all the ideas even of the Bush era seem totally inadequate. So many big projects and visions have failed, whether we are talking about U.S. imperial “democracy,” 20th century socialism, or even the new age movement – the whole millennial atmosphere of the turn of the century is dispersing. We’ve had record temperatures worldwide every month for almost a year. I mean, I saw spring flowers blooming in the middle of winter here in Louisiana in 2015. I am interested in exploring these zones of in-betweenness musically.

Joshua: Gregory and I actually met through the kind of transgressive literature scene. He published a few short stories of mine. We still connect on that level I think. I’m working as a kind of third creative mind on his novel The Ugly Spirit, which is fucking great, by the way. I’m the E.K. to his Edmund Spenser. We started making music together to soundtrack the publication and we just clicked. We both have hands in the same kind of experimental sound.

Why the choice of Scandinavian mythology as a concept for the Wolf Age album?

Gregory: I don’t have an exact answer of why we decided to focus here. I have worked with Odin and the runes in the past. The mythology is something that comes up periodically in my life. After working on Collapsed Cartographies, Joshua and I were talking about a possible EP centered around Norse mythology. I suppose I’ve always been drawn to the apocalyptic current in northern mythology (i.e. with the idea of Ragnarok), and that seems like a fitting motif for the times, given that we are in some kind of interregnum.

Joshua: Gregory contacted me regarding putting together a project based on Norse Mythology. We both have a complicated relationship with the occult. I think our concept for the album, the lack of gender binary in Norse folklore, has a good academic basis and also might stop neo-fascist, dude-bro Asatru types from listening to our music, which is good.

During the creative process of the album there was some sort of material (musical, literary, artistic, etc.) or personal experience that influenced your way of work?

Gregory: At a highly abstract level, the mood suggested by this corresponded with a number of things happening in my life at the time. My grandmother was dying and I was also coming out of a period of pharmaceutical drug addiction, so I was in a dark and foreboding mood, but also being forced to start over on various levels. Joshua began sending me skeletal tracks with titles referring to specific episodes in the Poetic Edda. From there I added vocals or whatever else I felt inspired to add. In retrospect, I think that I benefitted by being prompted to create around mythic themes, which drew me away from the purely close-up view of my own life. In everything I did, I tried to maintain a certain fidelity to the stories in the Edda.

Joshua: This was recorded during a period of immense, but painful personal growth for me. Lots of stuff changed while we were making this. As far as artistic influences, a lot of David Bowie. Old gay pornography. Death in June. Metro Boomin. The devil, perhaps.

Could you describe the process of recording?

Gregory: We did everything remotely. Joshua would send me a base track, or I would send him one. He would add something. I would add something. I think we both gravitated toward a combination of improvisational, noisy approaches, with a structured style of song writing. I definitely wanted to have choruses, verses, and all of that sort of thing, but also a tendency for that coherence to dissolve, and then come back together.

Joshua: We recorded our parts separately and then emailed them to each other. Postal Service style.

Wolf Age possesses a strong ritualist vibe. Is there some sort of proceeding to fully appreciate the music as a listener?

Gregory: My approach to music reflects my life-long interest in the occult. I haven’t made any music specifically for rituals, but the music is, as you say, ritualistic. I do hope that listeners will have some interesting experience with the music. The tracks on this album refer to a mythic temporality, as does ritual. I would like for listeners to have a sense of being transported outside of our mundane sense of being in the world.

Joshua: Not for me. Take from it what you will.

The album is going to be released in cassette, could you comment briefly about that and why this media was chosen?

Gregory: We both have a strong interest in analog musical instruments. We use analog synth, drum machine, etc. I’m a good decade older than Joshua (30), so I have a certain nostalgic interest in these formats. The first album I ever bought was on tape, and my earliest sound experiments were with tape recorders. On a very pervasive level, this continuing interest is related to my long-term engagement with the work of William S. Burroughs, and the tape recorder-fueled influence that he had on a certain moment in time, particularly in the U.K. My primary touchstones, musically, are Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Current 93, and that whole occult musical scene…I see myself as continuing Burroughs’ research, as it were, to the point where I’ve literally done magical work to be in contact with Burroughs from beyond the grave. Also there seems to be a cassette revival going on now, like what has been happening with vinyl. I am interested in being part of that, precisely because it doesn’t seem to be purely backwards-looking. In fact, through the establishment of networks, particularly online, the cassette revival is intertwined with a lot of musical innovation. I like what Croatian Amor is doing, for example. There are so many new cassette releases at the moment.

Joshua: It’s just the classic underground music format. I love the scale of it. I love that it can be manipulated and destroyed and reshaped.

Do you see any relationships between the religious traditions of New Orleans and the ones practiced by the old Scandinavians?

Gregory: That’s an interesting question. In short, yes.

There has always been a lot going on in Louisiana. On the one hand, it is certainly a U.S. city, but it is also part of the Caribbean—in many respects the northern limit of the Caribbean. Many of the forces that have operated in Latin America have also been present here, so we have this kind of imported Mediterranean/pan-Latin/Catholic thing going on. For instance, I grew up outside of New Orleans in a rural, Sicilian ethnic community, embedded in a majority black town. It’s an odd experience of race and culture, considering, say, the historical composition of the Midwestern U.S. Another part of my family is from a Canary Island immigrant community, here. So I grew up around official Catholicism as well as folk Catholicism. The latter involved many essentially magical practices and orientations. Now, living in New Orleans, I see the ways that Hoodoo is still alive here, along with growing practices of Santeria, Mexican curanderismo, the Santa Muerte cult, etc. I’ve practiced Golden Dawn-style ceremonial magic for a long time as well. I feel very close to that, but there is something missing in that sort of practice, namely the veneration of ancestors and things like that, as I see in folk Catholic practices. I suspect that there are similarities between these kinds of approaches and how northern Europeans, in a shamanic culture, would have related to reality. I have more understanding of the contemporary traditions I just mentioned, whereas northern paganism is a reconstruction, except in the sense in which it survived and came down through fairy tales, folk songs, and so on. In that regard, we’re left speculating based on textual evidence and our own spiritual experimentation. Freya Aswynn has said that she sees similarities between northern paganism and West African diaspora religion. Something to think about.

Joshua: I’m actually not from New Orleans. I’ve been there a few times, though. Last time I ended up drinking absinthe with Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys. Wild.

In your opinion, what type of role does paganism exert in our contemporary society?

Gregory: Modernity brought about a radical de-centering, so that the Christian God is no longer at the center of social life in western civilization, or whatever we want to call it. Global capitalism has created a situation where extreme mixing of cultures is an accomplished fact. I don’t see any potential in resisting that mixing; we have already lost the ground of former identities, such that they ever existed. In some respects, maybe this is like a hyper-driven version of what happened in late antiquity, where Egyptian and Greek religious practices blended together, and Hermeticism and strange Gnostic cults flourished amid wild experimentation…This was brought about by the existence of a cosmopolitan empire that foreshadowed capitalist globalization. Gods abounded. This was the death of an old world but also a time of great creation.

Joshua: Paganism IS our society. Everything humans will ever do that is not directly related to our baseline survival implies faith and implies symbolism and implies archetypal thinking.

Any message to your listeners?

Gregory: If you’re out there, I want to connect with you! I want to find others who have the same deep longings that are driving me create art and think about the world, even in the face of the major disasters that are unfolding around us.

Joshua: Don’t ask permission.

Follow @interregnum-music, @abjectionproductions

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musiccosmosru · 6 years

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If you’ve ever sent a text to a roommate because it felt more natural than walking to the next room and actually communicating with them in person, you’ve experienced a glimpse into the creative life of Superorganism.

Finding each other on the internet through music forums and YouTube suggestions, the whole band moved into a London house where they create eccentric collages of indie pop together. Before the move, though, their earliest songs were created over Skype calls, Facebook chats, and email file transfers—an internet-based method that continues even now that they live under the same roof.

“The thing is, we still work online,” 18-year-old lead singer Orono Noguchi says. “We’ve started to try collaborating in the same room, being physically there together. But for the most part, we just work on our own demos in our own rooms, then we send them to each other.”

Referring to themselves as a “DIY pop production house,” Superorganism’s eight members sought each other out from far-reaching places like Japan, South Korea, Australia, England, and New Zealand. “At school, I couldn’t really find anyone who was on a similar creative wavelength as I was,” Orono explains. But when she finally met people online who shared her same tastes and do-it-yourself spirit, she says, “It seemed natural to join powers and make something awesome.”

Our full interview with Orono Noguchi is below, in which she discusses her early years writing fan fiction, the inspiring nature of YouTubers, life on the road with an eight-member band, and more.

I was listening to Ezra Koenig’s Beats 1 show last year, and heard him talking about your old fan fiction on air. What inspired your Vampire Weekend fan fiction phase as a 12-year-old?

I was borderline stalking them, I’d say. [Laughs]. I fell in love with their music and their art and I kind of joined an online community of other kids my age that were equally obsessed with them. I don’t know, I just felt like I wanted to create something and that creation was writing fan fiction. I combined everything that I was obsessed with at the time into one piece of fan fiction. So that’s why Ezra was dating Katy Perry and there were YouTubers thrown into the mix. MGMT was in there as well. [Editor’s note: See some of Orono’s fan fiction brought to life here].

Was writing always a hobby for you when you were growing up?

I wouldn’t call it a hobby but English class was definitely one of my favorite classes. It’s always been one of my best subjects since I was a little kid. It felt natural to do that.

I don’t really take anything seriously, including myself. Nor do I really want to be taken seriously, either. I’m not trying to make a statement or anything.

The absurdity of those fan fictions carries over to the humor in your lyrics now. Lots of your songs are about how crazy and weird the world is. Why do you like writing like that?

I think it stems from the fact that I don’t really take anything seriously, including myself. Nor do I really want to be taken seriously, either. I’m not trying to make a statement or anything. So I guess that’s why I jump around from talking about one thing to another. It turns from seeming kind of serious for a second, to jumping back and being wacky and weird. That’s just a reflection of not only me, but the whole band’s personality.

What kind of things were you into back when you were writing those fan fictions?

I was into YouTube, big time. Katy Perry. There were fandoms that I was in, but I wasn’t in one specific fandom. I was just kind of all over the place. I followed random tags on Tumblr and saved every single photo that I found. I was actually obsessed with Grimes at that time as well. Just all sorts of stuff. All internet stuff I’d say.

Photo by Ingrid Pops

You originally found some of the other Superorganism members through YouTube, right?

Yeah, back in the day that song “Somebody That I Used to Know” was a big hit. Kimbra was a feature on that song so I started listening to a lot of Kimbra’s music and she’s from New Zealand. I thought she was cool and I think that got the YouTube algorithm into recommending me lots of New Zealand indie stuff. There’s a viral video for a song called “The Cigarette Duet” by Princess Chelsea from New Zealand. I thought that was cool, then YouTube started recommending me other New Zealand indie stuff, which included some of the Superorganism members and their band projects.

We’re eight different people from different countries and backgrounds. The primary way that we communicate with each other and work is through the internet, so it makes sense to make a collage-like piece of art.

So it sounds like the band had been slowly forming for years, but it finally took shape as Superorganism when you joined?

Yeah, pretty much. We didn’t see Superorganism happening. None of us saw it coming. We were just like, “Hey, cool, we’re talented fun people, let’s get together and make some cool music.” That just came about through random chats on Facebook.

Bands used to form because all the members happened to live in the same town or they were classmates or something. But you guys were able to seek each other out and be more choosy on the internet. What attracted you to each other?

I’d say a good taste in music brought us together. But also the fact that some of us experienced being an outsider and being kind of isolated in a way. I had a weird situation where I was living in a small town in Japan, but I went to a school that was an hour away in an even smaller town. So I didn’t really have close friends in my neighborhood. Emily lived in Australia and moved to New Zealand. Harry lived in the UK, then moved to New Zealand. So having that experience as a kid warps your perspective in a way and I think that’s what we have in common.

I know you all come from very do-it-yourself backgrounds. Lots of DIY artists end up working in solitude and making music in their bedrooms. What made you guys want to do that in a group setting?

It just made sense, I guess. We kind of do things on the fly. We don’t get our own individual egos in the way of the creative process. So when it came to actually making art and trying to make the best kind of art that we can, it seemed natural to join powers and make something awesome.

Before joining Superorganism, did you plan on being a solo artist or did you always want to be in a group?

I was kind of open to anything. But at the time, at school, I couldn’t really find anyone who was on a similar creative wavelength as I was. That sounds fuckin’ stupid, I’m aware of that. But at the time, I was just working on stuff by myself.

After you met online, you guys all moved in together in a big house in London. Was it weird going from making songs over email and Skype to living together and doing that in person?

The thing is, we still work online for the most part. Even living together wasn’t that weird because we’re all pretty chill and none of us are really crazy OCD drama queens or whatever. So that works in our favor. It wasn’t that awkward, to be honest.

When you say you’re still working online, does that mean you’re all in different rooms of the house working on your own pieces, then you send it to each other?

Pretty much. We’ve started to try collaborating in the same room, being physically there together. But for the most part, we just work on our own demos in our own rooms, then we send them to each other.

How do you guys split up songmaking duties?

It’s quite freestyle, I’d say. None of us have dedicated parts or anything, because we’re all multi-instrumentalists. We can just do whatever. Also, if you have Logic, you don’t really need to play instruments.

Image via Jordan Hughes

Why do you guys prefer making music at the house instead of a studio?

We’re comfortable in that situation. Also, it saves money. We can do it at home. We’ve always done it at home. So why go to a studio and pay fuckin’ thousands of dollars for nothing, pretty much? We have it at home.

Lots of your songs take shape like collages. There are a bunch of weird samples, sound effects, vocals, and instruments. Where does that style come from?

Where do you guys find those samples and recordings?

It’s a good mix of everything. Sometimes we use field recordings. Sometimes we use royalty free sound effects websites. And sometimes we’re looking for specific audio clips, so we look for that on YouTube. It’s a little bit of everything.

We have a collaborative Spotify playlist and it has 500 songs or so at this point. It’s a mix of everything from Ariana Grande to weird experimental shit.

Your music has all these weird things going on, but it’s also really accessible and pop-friendly. What draws you to weird pop music like that?

It comes back to a lot of us having an outsider perspective. But then again, pop culture is so great because no matter how indie or hipster you are, you have a certain connection with pop culture. I think that’s the most fascinating and best part about it. Just the word “pop” binds us together, but we’re also outsiders. So I guess it makes sense for us to combine the best of both worlds and make that sort of music.

What do you guys usually end up listening to?

We have a collaborative Spotify playlist and it has 500 songs or so at this point. It’s a mix of everything from Ariana Grande to weird experimental shit.

What are your non-musical influences?

I think most of my influences are non-musical. I do have an inspo playlist on Spotify, but lately I’ve been obsessing over RuPaul. It’s the most fascinating thing ever—the world of drag queens. Not to make a pun here, but it’s a different world. It’s like a different organism of its own. I’ve never dabbled in it, so it’s been very inspiring to me, watching the show. And RuPaul’s music is fucking amazing and his podcast is so great. I just have so much respect for that guy.

Lots of young artists today make an effort to share everything about themselves on social media, but you seem to be more reserved. Why do you think that is?

Social media is weird and it’s fucked up. Especially for insecure teenagers, like myself. It definitely provides a good ego boost at times, but other times it’s just people shitting on your art for no reason, just because they’re also insecure about their lives. Sometimes I think, “Oh, that would be cool to post on the internet.” And then I’m like, “Oh wait, there’s no point in me doing that.”

But then again, there are so many YouTubers and quote “social media influencers” that all these 10-year-olds follow today. They inspire those kids and make them feel less shitty. They give the kids someone to relate to in a really intense way, because they provide so much of what’s going on in their lives, so publicly. I think there’s a certain beauty to that. I understand them because I’ve definitely felt that, watching lots of YouTubers’ videos about going through really shitty times and depression and all of that.

Hopefully there’s a healthy mix. I think it’s important to try and utilize social media in the most efficient way possible without hurting anyone’s feelings. I know that’s really hard but that’s why I try and stay away from it. I’m not too active on social media because it makes me feel like shit. But then again, it kind of makes me feel good. It’s confusing.

It doesn’t look like it’s turned you into divas or anything, but I’m sure the success has changed some things for you guys. What’s different now as opposed to before you put out “Something For Your M.I.N.D.”?

I think our whole lives have turned upside-down. I think I’ve become a diva in a way, actually. When we started off touring and doing all these interviews and stuff, I was so conscious of how I was being perceived by other people. I was like, “I’m so lucky to be in this position. I don’t want to seem like an ungrateful little bitch.” So I was trying too hard to be like, “This is so great and fun.” But the reality is, touring is the most stressful thing. It’s one of the craziest things that a human being can do, in my opinion. You get up at like three in the morning. Then you do all these interviews. Then you play a show at like midnight. Then you go back and do the same thing over and over again. For a whole summer you do that. Then you go on tour in the States and all these places. It’s so intense and hectic.

I feel like it’s unrealistic to be like, “I’m fine! We’re Superorganism—just a fun, quirky, internet band!” I think that’s bullshit. So here I am, being like, I’m stressed out right now! I’m tired. I barely got any sleep, so I’m telling you about it. I think that’s definitely changed. I think it’s also changed how we make music because we barely spend any time at home anymore. We’re on the road constantly. That makes it hard to make music, because we make music at home where we’re comfortable. Touring is definitely not that comfortable. So we’re trying to figure out a way to make that work. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re still working on stuff, which is good. It’s definitely changed our lives, though, in such a great way that it’s hard to explain. It’s a lot to handle.

With all the touring, are you thinking about new music yet? You don’t have to give away too much, but what’s next?

Yeah. All the complaining I did just now started because we have a passion for making art and making music. That still applies, thankfully. We are working on stuff and we have been working on stuff this whole time. When we finished the record last August, we actually ended up with way too many songs. Domino was basically like, “Hey, you guys are a new band. Maybe let’s cut it down a bit so it’s more palatable for a wider audience.” That totally made sense and I think it made for a better record. So that was a good call. But we have a bunch of stuff laying around. Hopefully we can release it as soon as possible. Take a break from touring and work on more stuff. Collaborating with other people, too. That’s up in the air.

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albumstorage · 7 years

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Shamir on Tumblr, food vloggers & problematic faves

We speak to the indie auteur about his favourite online obsessions, from queer Tumblr memes to ‘specifically black’ Instagram comedy

3November 2017Text

Grant Rindner

Dazed Faves is the series where we talk all things online – that surreal meme account you’re obsessed with, weird conspiracy theory subreddits, ASMR YouTubes or slime Instagrams.

Shamir’s cathartic new record, Revelations, cements the soon-to-be 23-year-old musician’s metamorphosis from house pop wunderkind to guitar-wielding indie rock auteur. Its predecessor Hope was the result of a weekend-long recording binge during a dark period in which he considered quitting music entirely, and his latest is equally stripped down and deeply personal, focusing both on his own struggles and those of his generation at large.

“I feel like Hope and Revelations are like sister records, and I think they’re both a journey,” he says. “Hope is full of questions, and I think Revelations is full of answers.”

While the album is full of honest, occasionally bleak reflections on his recent personal and professional hardships, it’s thrilling to hear Shamir finally have the chance to channel influences like Courtney Love, Blake Babies, and Velocity Girl into this grunge-inspired project that feels like the young artist fully taking the reins on his career. The singles “90’s Kids” and “Straight Boy” each tackle weighty subjects while showcasing his sparkling knack for melodies and pristine tenor.

The latter is a critique of self-centered tendencies of straight males as well as a send-up of the commodification of allyship. The former is as vivid an account of millennial anxiety as we’ve heard lately; it’s fittingly both droll and dire which fits a generation all too accustomed to making World War III jokes on Twitter. “We talk with vocal fry / We watch our futures die,” he sings in the opening verse.

The “90’s Kids” video is a mesmerizing crash course in meme history with Shamir’s vocals and lips animated into everything from Salt Bae to a yelling Meryl Streep (which he says is his all-time favorite). “I knew what I wanted to do because I’m like, “What’s a universal way that ‘90s kids transfer their anxiety and problems and energy into the world?” he explains. “Memes.”

With memes on the mind, it makes sense for Shamir to take part in our Faves series, where we speak to artists about their online obsessions. A week before the release of Revelations we caught up with Shamir over brunch in Philadelphia, discussing the ineffable appeal of Trisha Paytas, queer comedy, and the Twitter hero who showed him where he could get a gluten-free Philly cheesesteak.

FAVE TUMBLR: MILES JAI

Shamir: Miles Jai grew up in North Las Vegas with me. I was roommates with his best friend. He’s also in my first video (for ‘If It Wasn’t True’). His posts are so funny. A lot of it is very queer and gay-specific too. Pretty much every time I open up my Tumblr app, instead of going through what’s already on my dash I type in ‘Miles Jai’ first, go through his Tumblr, and then go through my dash.

Read Miles Jai’s Tumblr here

FAVE TWITTER: LANAKANE

Shamir: So she became my angel in life. I had been living out here (in Philadelphia) for maybe a year-and-a-half and got strict about not eating gluten, and I just really wanted a cheesesteak. I’m like, ‘It’s not fair, I live in Philadelphia, I can’t eat a cheesesteak.’ She gave me the info that Joe’s in Fishtown has gluten-free rolls. I was like, ‘Girl, you lying?’ And I went there and they had it and I was like, ‘You are an angel.’

So I think she lives in, like, Jersey and after I followed her on Twitter we were DMing. She’s definitely into comedy and is just so funny. She had this one great tweet where I was talking about people who still think gender and sex are the same thing, and how also those people like to bring in science – when obviously they don’t know about science, because they still think gender and sex is the same thing. And she’s like, ‘Everybody’s a scientist when it comes to gender, but nobody’s a scientist when it’s like 80 degrees in the middle of October.’ And I was like, that’s so fucking true! All of her other posts are so funny, I love her Twitter.

that AND the fact they claim to know my good sis science when obviously they don't

everybody's a scientist when it comes to gender but not when it's 85 degrees in the middle of October

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FAVE VLOGGER: TRISHA PAYTAS

Shamir: I’m sorry – I get so emotional when I think about Trisha because like... (pauses) I don’t even know. I just love her. I want to be her best friend. I just see so much of myself in Trisha. She’s definitely like, problematic at times, but she’s definitely a problematic fave. I think that it’s kind of a character that she plays up, but (at the same time) definitely think it’s an extension of her. I just think that she lives in her own little world and it’s refreshing to see.

I don’t know if anyone can really describe – like, anyone who loves her – can really describe why they do. I just think it’s like, she kind of seems like someone that we all know who’s kind of problematic, but not intentionally. The 7-Eleven one is so good, with her pink trunk. I would literally watch her have a mukbang, eat a bunch of shit, for literally an hour. It feels like you’re having dinner with her. I don’t watch other mukbangs except for hers.

FAVE INSTAGRAM: LALASIZAHANDS89

Shamir: She’s just funny as fuck. She’s like, ratchet funny. She’s just great. Her voice is funny, the way she talks is funny – how she just will just openly pull off her wig in the middle of a conversation. Her voiceovers are funny. She’s just fucking funny. Generally I’m good at explaining (things), but when it comes to like Trisha and probably (Lala), that’s a little hard. Trisha, definitely, I just can’t explain – like I just love her – Lala is slightly different because I think that her sense of humor is just so tailor-made to me, the ratchetness of it. It’s kind of just black humor.

One specific post I can think of for LalaSizahands is the one where she’s so hungry and she sings this song behind a, like, New Edition instrumental, which is so specifically black – but it’s just humor that I normally really couldn’t send to my white friends ‘cause they’re like, ‘Who’s New Edition?’ You know, most white kids my age don’t know New Edition. Most black kids do because their parents listened to them – they’re like One Direction before One Direction, but black. I definitely send my LalaSizahands videos to my black friends and we laugh about it.

I think that’s why Lala specifically hits home for me. It’s definitely black humor. I think Miles (Jai)’s humor is a little more universal (than Lala’s) and definitely a little more queer and gay-based.

FAVE WEBSERIES: EIGHTY-SIXED

Shamir: So Eighty-Sixed is a show I found through my friend Owen (Thiele), who plays Owen in the show. And I just saw it on his Instagram and I’m always down to watch a good webseries. That’s how I found Isa Rae (with Awkward Black Girl). It’s so great to see her grow, and I definitely see the same potential with this show… Eighty-Sixed is really funny – I see a lot of myself and my friends with them, like how they communicate.

The birthday episode is the best one, where she goes live and says her name and then goes off live (when Remi’s ex joins) and she’s like, ‘Did you really just say (my) name right now and then go off live?’ We all have friends that are ridiculous like that. That one specifically kind of reminds me of my best friend – we’ve been best friends since eighth grade.

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